Kant | Peter Fletcher

Some observations on An Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment?” by Immanuel Kant.

I find it interesting that Kant uses metaphors denoting struggle, effort, and breaking of bonds as essential to the achievement of enlightenment. By my reading of Kant it is impossible to achieve enlightenment, a state of human maturity, by doing nothing. One must make an effort and toil to achieve enlightenment. Kant believes that public/societal enlightenment can be achieved by ensuring the freedom of the individual to reason in public.

“Thus it would be very harmful if an officer receiving an order from his superiors were to quibble openly, while on duty, about the appropriateness or usefulness of the order in question. He must simply obey. But he cannot reasonably be banned from making observations as a man of learning on the errors in the military service, and from submitting these to his public for judgement.”

Kant uses the example of a clergyman who is compelled to preach in accord with church dogma while in church, but who must be permitted to use his public reason in a public domain in oder to achieve his own enlightenment:

“For to maintain that the guardians of the people in spiritual matters should themselves be immature, is an absurdity which amounts to making absurdities permanent.”

Kant believed that rules and edicts that are set in stone for all time are contrary to progress toward enlightenment which he says is a human entitlement.

Which leads me to the tension that is at the heart of my thesis and that is who has sovereignty over what a person says about their work in a public space? Where does work begin and end? And even if a company can argue that they do have dominion over a person’s speech on a private blog, is the denial of their rights, and therefore of their potential to achieve some form of enlightenment, the best or smartest strategy.

I argue it’s not.

Foucault critiques Kant’s article Was ist Aufklärung? and notes that Kant believes that enlightenment is both and individual task and a responsibility of society. He shows how Kant believes enlightenment cannot be achieved whilst we are immature, by which he means that we simply take orders where reason could be applied. Examples are given. Relying on the answer in a book, relying on the orders of a spiritual advisor for our conscience, and being told by a doctor what to eat.

Kant observes the way reason can be applied in public for reason’s sake. We might pay our taxes and then debate the rationale behind their payment, or we could give pastoral care and then debate religious dogma. Using reason for reason’s sake demonstrates maturity, a necessary step toward achieving enlightenment. He distinguishes between public and private reason and notes that private reason may be willfully circumscribed by reason of a person’s station in life. A person in the army may not have the same degree of latitude to debate an order but reason would have it that obeying the order provides a worthy end.

“…when one is reasoning as a member of reasonable humanity, then the use of reason must be free and public. Enlightenment is thus not merely the process by which individuals would see their own personal freedom of thought guaranteed. There is Enlightenment when the universal, the free, and the public uses of reason are superimposed on one another.”

An Answer to the Question: "What is Enlightenment? | Imanuel Kant

Foucualt’s response to Kant

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